What Is a Twenty-First Century Job?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/what-is-a-21st-century-jo_b_850081.html
According to the White House website, “President Obama will reform America’s public
schools to deliver a twenty-first century education that will prepare all children for success in the
new global workplace.” In addition, President Obama’s “first priority” in confronting the current
economic crisis is “to put Americans back to work.”
The president made clear the connection between education and work in the 2011 State of the
Union address, where he explained that “nearly half of all new jobs will require education that
goes beyond a high school education.” On another recent occasion the president declared, “If we
want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”
If President Obama is right about the importance of education for improving national
competitiveness, you would expect teaching to be a twenty0first century growth industry. Yet
teachers are facing layoffs across the country and the population of students in schools of
education is declining. In addition, teacher unions and professional associations are under attack
and seniority rights that protect our most experienced teachers may soon disappear.
Evidently this is really not a nation that values education, certainly not mass public
education. Who would chose a career that is at best temporary and where PowerPoint slides
marketed by textbook and testing companies may soon replace teachers in the classroom?
College graduates may soon be faced with the choice between earning minimum wage flipping
burgers at McDonald’s or flipping prepackaged slides at a “school” near you.
Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize–winning economist at Princeton University and a New York
Times columnist, has warned that twenty-first century jobs may not be tied to higher education
and improved skills at all. For example, new software has simplified legal searches and wiped
out entry-level middle-class jobs in the legal profession. Software has also been replacing highly
skilled well-educated computer engineers who specialize in chip design.
According to Krugman, rather than expanding in recent decades, since the 1990s the type of
work that supports a strong middle class has lagged behind the rest of the economy. Krugman
cited studies by economists David Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard Murnane, who argued that
computers excel at “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit
rules.” Jobs that primarily include searching and maintaining research databases (such as the
work done by paralegals and medical and insurance personnel), information sorting
(bookkeepers and accountants), and information delivery (teachers?) may disappear or just be
deprofessionalized, with a parallel collapse in salary.
Krugman concluded, “the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the
middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college
degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing
decade.”
So where should the ambitious student look for twenty-first century jobs? The April 17,
2011, Education Life section of The New York Times made specific recommendations listing the
top ten growth fields. Unfortunately, there are relatively few jobs available in these fields, or
they are low-paid, low-skill work.
The number-one field is biomedical engineering, with a projected growth rate of 72 percent.
The mean salary for someone with a master’s degree in science or engineering is projected at
$82,500. Unfortunately, they only anticipate 12,000 new slots by 2018, or about 1,500 a year. If
you want a job in this field, you better start lining up now. Network and data analysts (number
two) get paid a little less (mean of $76,500), but they anticipate more jobs in the field (over
50,000), that is, until they are all outsourced to India and the Philippines.
Number five (financial examiner, 11,000 jobs) and number seven (physician’s assistant
,29,000 jobs) are also the types of jobs where the more skilled work will be quickly outsourced.
That leaves medical scientist (44,000 jobs) and biochemist/biophysicist (9,000 jobs) for
American Ph.D. students.
Low-wage jobs are the big boom area as the baby boomer population ages. College graduates
can find plenty of minimum-wage work as home health aides (anticipated 461,000 jobs), as less
demanding personal care attendants (anticipated 376,000 jobs), pushing skin care products to the
aged (15,000 jobs), and helping them in the gym (6,000 jobs).
Maybe President Obama is right and Paul Krugman and The New York Times are wrong? If
that is the case, I need him to be more specific. I would like to be able to tell my students where
they can find the twenty-first century jobs.
If Obama and his economic team and the budget-cut Republicans who control the House of
Representatives are wrong, however, they should reread a clever little poem written by Langston
Hughes called “A Dream Deferred” (1951).
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?